PORT ANGELES — A 23-year-old Port Angeles man was in the Clallam County jail Thursday following his arrest Wednesday evening for allegedly abusing a 3-month-old infant who was under his care.
Bail of $100,000 was set for Sean Allan Englebright on Tuesday in Clallam County Superior Court.
Judge Brent Basden set 1 p.m. Monday for the filing of charges against Englebright, who is being held in the Clallam County jail on a charge of first-degree assault of a child, a Class A felony.
The baby was transported Monday to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma, according to the probable cause statement Basden signed Thursday.
Her condition was unavailable Thursday.
When brought into Olympic Medical Center (OMC) on Tuesday, she had 11 fractures, including to her ribs and her leg, that had occurred over weeks, according to the statement.
Michele Devlin, Clallam County chief criminal deputy prosecuting attorney, recommended the $100,000 bail.
“This baby was pretty much tortured for the three months of her life,” Devlin said.
The girl was born in November and kept at a hospital in Everett for the first month of her life after breathing in fecal matter during her birth and is on oxygen at night, according to a police report.
Englebright was the girl’s primary caregiver while her mother worked, according to court records.
Authorities became alerted to the baby’s injuries after Englebright and the child’s mother brought her to OMC on Monday with a swollen left leg and “a mark on her face that looked like a human bite,” according to the probable cause statement.
Englebright and the mother first told authorities that the bite was the result of their elderly, blind chihuahua biting the baby.
The infant had a displaced femur fracture and rib fractures in different stages of healing that appeared to be a week to weeks old, according to the statement.
“Dr. Whitley said that such injuries were the result of ‘non-accidental trauma’ 99 percent of the time,” according to the statement.
The mother, who accompanied the child to Mary Bridge Hospital, told a social worker at the hospital that she believed Englebright was hurting her baby, that he was sleep-deprived and had a bad temper, but that she had never seen him injure the child.
Port Angeles Police Detective Shane Martin said that Englebright told him he had anger issues and was frustrated over caring for a newborn with medical issues who cried a lot. He denied drug and alcohol use but said he becomes “really angry when he drinks alcohol,” according to Martin.
The police report said that Englebright said he believed the fractured ribs were caused by him squeezing the infant “really hard out of frustration,” believing the girl’s ribs were fractured during those occasions, which first occurred about a month ago.
Realizing that one of those times he caused her pain, “he said that he just wanted her to stop crying and to be happy,” Martin said.
He said he suspected her leg was broken after he yanked it when it was caught between his foot and leg, according to the statement.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
